I WAS expelled from Liverpool College at the age of ten and though my parents found this most unamusing, at that age I was not greatly worried for Liverpool College was not the last school in the world, nor, certainly, was it one of the best.
My expulsion was ‘for inattention and for being below standard’. My parents were sent for and unfolded before them were my failings, itemized one by one in that catalogue-of-crime manner which comes so naturally to schoolmasters.
The housemaster explained that there would be no point in my remaining at a school in which I obviously had no pride and he produced, as evidence of my unworthiness, a design for a programme which I had prepared beneath my desk in mathematics classes. It was decorated with dancing girls and, for a boy of ten, it was a fair piece of creative art, though it had nothing to do with mathematics.
I remember thinking that the mathematics master showed little imagination or appreciation when he discovered the programme. ‘What, Epstein,’ he thundered, ‘is this piece of rubbishy nonsense?’ and I said: ‘A design Sir.’
‘Rubbish and muck and girls,’ he answered and threw me out of the classroom on the first of a series of short, sharp journeys which jerked and jolted me finally to a sofa in my home sitting opposite my father who said, with great justification and dwindling patience: ‘I just don’t know what on earth we’re going to do with you.’
Nor did I and it was another fifteen years before I showed any real promise. I must surely be one of the latest-developers of all time for not until my mid-twenties did any pattern or purpose emerge in my life. If Keats had waited as long as I did to get going he wouldn’t have written more than a couple of poems before his death.
My parents despaired many times over the years and I don’t blame them, for throughout my schooldays I was one of those out-of-sorts boys who never quite fit. Who are ragged, nagged and bullied and beloved of neither boys or masters.
At the age of ten I had already been to three schools and had liked none of them.
I am an elder son—a hallowed position in a Jewish family—and much was to be expected of me. My father, Harry, son of a Polish migrant, naturally sought in me some sign of an adequate heir to the family business but, alas, he scarcely saw a sign of any quality at all beyond a loyalty to the family, which, thanks to the steadfastness of my parents, has not faltered.
I was born in a nursing home on September 19th, 1934, in Rodney Street, Liverpool. This is the Harley Street of the city—a wide and rather magnificent road of tall, old houses bearing brass plates and learned names, and it was as good a start in life as you could get in Liverpool which is not, conventionally, a very beautiful city.
My mother, Queenie, still the loveliest woman I know, was intensely proud that her first-born was a boy and when, twenty-one months later, my brother Clive arrived, the Epsteins looked like being a happy and promising little family unit.
Today, thirty years later this is so again, but there were many intervening spans of misunderstanding, failure and unhappiness before we found real contentment as a family. I was not the best of sons and I was certainly the worst of pupils.
My first school was a kindergarten in Liverpool where I hammered wooden shapes through a plywood board and made rather a mess of it. I constructed models from cardboard and they wouldn’t stick. And, after a lethargic fashion, I learned to read and to write.
When I was six, Hitler, who had become rather a nuisance, launched a sustained attempt to destroy Liverpool, and though we lived several miles from the vulnerable docks target, our Childwall suburb became too close for comfort and safety.
Thousands of Liverpool children were evacuated to the country and separated from their parents, but other families decided to close up their homes in the city and move as units either across the Mersey to the sanctuary of the Wirral peninsular, or up the coast to Southport, where there was a substantial Jewish community.
My father chose Southport and we stayed there until the bombing was over. I was put into Southport College where I made my first fumbling attempt at drawing and design which I enjoyed hugely. But away from the protective warmth of a kindergarten and experiencing for the first time the alien discipline of teachers with an eye on potential scholarship candidates, I began to realize that with little to offer in the way of brilliance and nothing in the way of acceptable personality, I was not a very popular individual.
A tiny child in a well-adjusted family doesn’t know too much about popularity or outside relationships. He has his parents and they love him and that is that.
But as a growing boy I discovered that I was not very good at forming friendships. Indeed, I believe I am not especially successful at it now, though it is easier these days because I am probably a nicer person.
And, of course, today there is another factor in my placing with other people—I wield a certain amount of what, for want of a better word, is described as power. This in turn brings other problems because it is no longer easy to know whether I am wanted for what I am or for what I am supposed to have in terms of material goods or power. In other words—do people want me or do they want the Beatles through me?
The bombing, in 1943, appeared to be over and my family returned to Childwall. I was taken from Southport College and after an interview with the headmaster of Liverpool College, I was admitted as a scholar of whom they expected no great brilliance.
In this, the stern and upright men who controlled this minor public school were not disappointed for I was, as I say, expelled. Expulsion is an ugly word and I had always believed that it only happened to bullies or thieves or liars like Flashman in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a sombre book which I had read without enthusiasm.
But I was not a bully—I was far too slight and cowardly. I was not a thief for my parents gave me most of what I wanted, probably a little more than I needed, and I had little chance to lie because I hardly ever spoke to anyone.
I left Liverpool College without regret.
One feature of life which I experienced there and at other schools and sometimes since, was anti-semitism. Even now it lurks round the corner in some guise or other and though it doesn’t matter to me any more, it did when I was young.
Lightly though I took my dismissal from Liverpool College, I still had to make a pretence at formal education but my parents were running short of ideas. My father, an uncomplicated man, had been a solid and successful grammar-school boy and he found it difficult to know why I was so wretched a pupil.
Obviously, an expellee from Liverpool College would not be readily accepted at my father’s old school, Liverpool Collegiate, or at the other major grammar school, Liverpool Institute (which, many years later, attempted to educate two of the Beatles—and almost succeeded.) Good grammar schools don’t want public school rejects.
So I was sent to a private school whose mentors asked no questions and from which my parents swiftly subtracted me after a few weeks because it was so thoroughly unsatisfactory.
It was in Liverpool and it was so awful that, sorry though my parents were to part with me, they decided that I would have to go away to school—to board. The problem was that they and their advisers were running out of schools.
Well … when in doubt turn to the religion you know. Thus was I despatched with my tuck-box and a headful of good advice to a Jewish prep school called ‘Beaconsfield’ near Tunbridge Wells. This I enjoyed a little better and I took up horse-riding and art, both of which I did pretty well. I began to feel a little more at evens with the world and I made friends with a little horse called ‘Amber’, who got on very well with Jews.
But … I was approaching the age of thirteen, which meant that I should sit examinations for a public school, and these I failed on a majestic scale.
I had, by now, developed a conscious hatred of formal education. I was bad at mathematics and all sciences. I had no rapport with the men teaching me, nor, I felt, had they any sympathy with my difficulties. One by one, as examination followed interview and interview followed examination, the great public schools of England turned me down—Rugby and Repton and Clifton, and, no doubt, others.
So once again my parents were faced with the problem of keeping my knees beneath a desk until I was, at least, legally able to leave school. They solved it, as many patient paters and maters before and since, have solved it, by sending me to one of those benevolent academies where failures are welcomed although not accepted as such, and protected almost to manhood.
This one was in Dorset. Games were considered to be rather special and I played Rugby under coercion and not very well, but I suffered it with calm and in the evenings I pursued my interest in design and colour. Art was not then considered to be a worthy occupation for a red-blooded son of an Englishman, but it was the only thing in my narrow world for which I cared. Also it was the only thing at which I was any good.
Back in Liverpool, my father who was, and is, a proud citizen and father, was writing and working hard to find me a good school before it was too late.
Finally he succeeded and in the Autumn of 1948 just after my fourteenth birthday, my parents and brother telephoned me in Dorset to say that I was going to Wrekin College in Shropshire, a well-known public school with a reputation for producing executives and successful leaders of one kind or another, though not of a level of Eton or Harrow.
But the vision of its spartan rigidity beckoned me not at all so ‘Oh’ I said, and at the end of the year I wrote with gloomy pessimism, ‘Now for the Wrekin I hate. I am going there only because my parents want me to … it is a pity because it has been a great year for me. The birth of new ideas. A little more popularity.’
A little later, I wrote—and I repeat it now with wry hindsight—‘Just before my first day at Wrekin we spent a day at Sheffield—my mother’s home city. I expected to be taken to the Grand. But no.’
The Grand is a large, expensive hotel—the biggest in Sheffield and it is curious that even in those days I expressed my disappointment at not being taken there. Now, on a wider, more discriminating and rather more expensive scale, I still find little pleasure in accepting less than the best and it may be this leaning towards superlative which drove me on in business and will continue to whip me into fresh activity.
Well, Wrekin came and went. I didn’t like it nor it me and the school report said: ‘Could do better’, or ‘Listless effort this term’, and I think they may have been right. Except in two respects: I had become a good painter and a reasonable amateur actor. I played in the normal school one-acters and I found I enjoyed speaking lines.
In art I came top of the form and I was glad because although I had accepted defeat in a very wide range of subjects, I had always wanted to be best at something. And on the basis of proficiency with paint and paper, at the age of sixteen, and before sitting for what was then the school certificate examination, I wrote home and asked to be taken away from school so that I could become a dress designer.
This caused a great deal of distress. The masters at Wrekin naturally thought it was ruinous to leave school without a single qualification and there was, to their minds nothing less manly than dress designing.
My father agreed and he had an additional anxiety for he believed such a job would not only not pay enough, but, worse, could lead me into unemployment. Thus, I did not become one.
Although I knew good design from bad, though I could create dresses and draw them, though to be a dress designer was all I wanted to be, I went—in that curiously illogical way of the son and heir—into the family business for which I neither cared nor in which I expected to succeed.
Still … if you had been to seven schools, had a rotten time in all of them, been expelled from one and thwarted from your single aim, you can be relied upon to accept anything and so, on September 10th, 1950, aged nearly sixteen, thin, curly-haired, pink-cheeked, and half educated, I reported for duty in the family furniture store in Walton, Liverpool.